The Domain Trap is a cognitive and strategic failure where a manufacturer becomes so deeply entrenched in their own technical specialism that they lose the ability to communicate its value to external stakeholders. In the design and construction ecosystem, this is a high-functioning form of expertise blindness: the more a manufacturer masters their craft, the more they struggle to see their product through the eyes of a non-specialist specifier.
This trap is fundamentally an expression of the curse of knowledge. It is the psychological inability to remember what it was like not to understand the nuances of a particular engineering feat. When a firm falls into this trap, they inadvertently engage in technical siloing, presenting information that is structurally sound within their own department but contextually irrelevant to an architect. They provide a highly technical answer to a question the specifier hasn’t actually asked.
Detailed Explanation #
Humans, being human, tend to believe that what is important to them is objectively important to everyone else. In manufacturing, this manifests as a perception gap. A manufacturer might spend five years perfecting a specific alloy, but to an architect, that alloy is merely a means to an end—a way to achieve a particular finish, a required fire rating, or a sustainable BREEAM score.
The Domain Trap creates cognitive friction. When a manufacturer presents a CPD or a technical data sheet laden with internal jargon, they are essentially asking the architect to do the heavy lifting of translation. Architects don’t reject these products because the technical data is wrong; they reject them because the effort required to bridge the technical silo is too high.
The structural mechanism at play here is a lack of narrative translation. To escape the trap, a manufacturer must move past their expertise blindness and shift from describing what the product is (the domain) to demonstrating what the product solves (the application).
Real-World Application & Case Studies #
- The Glazing Fallacy:A high-end facade manufacturer develops a new thermal break technology. They go to market with a 40-page white paper focused entirely on the molecular structure of the polyamide strip.
- The Trap: By succumbing to the curse of knowledge, they communicate within their own domain (material science).
- The FRAKT Reframe: The architect doesn’t want a lecture on polymers; they want to know how this technology allows for thinner sightlines and larger spans of glass without falling foul of Part O (Overheating) regulations. By reframing the “molecular” as “design freedom,” the manufacturer breaks out of their technical silo and gains trust.
- The Acoustic Silo:A manufacturer of acoustic ceiling baffles focuses their entire sales pitch on $R_w$ values and sound absorption coefficients in a laboratory setting.
- The Trap: Expertise blindness leads them to assume the architect will do the mental gymnastics to figure out how this affects a busy open-plan office.
- The FRAKT Reframe: By providing a “Behavioural Map” of the product—showing how the baffles reduce “distraction distance”—the manufacturer moves from a technical commodity to a strategic design partner.
The Behavioural Lens #
The absurdity of the Domain Trap is that it is often a byproduct of high competence. We solve this by introducing intellectual rigour: questioning every technical claim until only the most architect-centric essence remains. Precision is not just about the data; it is about the precision of the communication itself.
“Your technical data shouldn’t be a riddle for the architect to solve; it should be the solution they can’t wait to specify.”
